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The lovers' expressions of mutual affection and desire in the Song of Songs include intimate and detailed poetic descriptions of the body. These are challenging to interpret because the imagery used is cryptic, drawing on seemingly incongruous aspects of nature, architecture and war. Biblical scholarship frequently expresses some discomfort or embarrassment over this language, yet largely maintains the view that it should be interpreted positively as a complimentary and loving description of the body. If read without this hermeneutic, however, the imagery appears to construct nonsensical and ridiculous pictures of the human form, which raise interesting questions, and pose definite challenges, for the Song's readers. Fiona Black addresses the problematic nature of the Song's body imagery by using the artistic and literary construct of the grotesque body as a heuristic. The resulting reading investigates some issues for the Song that are often left to the margins, namely, the Song's presentation of desire, its politics of gender, and the affect of the text.
The book concludes with the identification of some implications of this reading, including the creation of a new framework in which to understand the relevance of the Song's imagery for its presentation of love. This is volume 12 in the Gender, Culture, Theory subseries and volume 392 in the Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement series.

List of Figures

p. x

Acknowledgements

p. xi

Abbreviations

p. xiii

Introduction

p. 1

The Problem of the Body in the Song of Songs

p. 9

Free Associations: Bodies in /and Erotic Discourse

p. 11

Body Imagery in the Song of Songs

p. 20

The Descriptions

p. 20

Wasf Nest

p. 23

Biblical Scholarship and the Body Images: A Review

p. 24

Allegorical Interpretation of the Body Imagery

p. 25

Modern Commentary on the Wasfs and the `Hermeneutic of Compliment'

p. 29

Romancing the Text

p. 32

Reading in Context

p. 37

`Evocative' Reading

p. 42

Body Imagery and Gender Criticism

p. 49

Excess in Imagery: Psychoanalytic and Pornographic Readings

p. 57

A Grotesque Proposal

p. 62

Uncovering the Grotesque Body

p. 65

Grotesque Beginnings and Developments: A Context for the Grotesque Body

p. 66

The Grotesque in the Art of the Renaissance: From the Pope's Palace to the Devil's Arse

p. 66

Renaissance Wanderings: Arcimboldo and Bosch

p. 72

Margins and Centres

p. 82

Bakhtin, Rabelais and the Grotesque Body

p. 87

Bakhtin's Day out at the Fair

p. 87

Freaks at the Fair

p. 90

Raining on Bakhtin's Parade: Three Major Criticisms

p. 97

Allowed Fools

p. 97

Who's Laughing Now?

p. 100

Carnival Meets the Uncanny

p. 103

The Female Grotesque, or, a `Cunning Array of Stunts'

p. 106

The Volatile Body

p. 107

Making a Spectacle (of ...?)

p. 113

Prefigurative Possibilities and Kristeva's Abject

p. 116

The Grotesque Body and the Not-So-Sublime Song?

p. 120

Revealed and Concealed: The Grotesque Body in the Song of Songs

p. 122

First Impressions

p. 126

Metamorphosis: Barthes' Heads on the Lovers' Bodies

p. 133

The Themes

p. 142

Nature/Cycles/Life/Cycles ...

p. 142

Sex, Naturally; or `Pardon me, Have you Seen my Vagina?'

p. 147

War, the Land and other Alienations

p. 153

Playing with (his) Parts: Inversion and Song 5.10-16

p. 159

Strategies

p. 165

Analogy Gone Mad

p. 166

Double Articulation: A Secret Language?

p. 172

Struggling for Meaning and Speaking `Other-ly'

p. 174

On Reading the Grotesque (Erotically)

p. 186

Looking in at the Lattice: The Grotesque and the Lovers in the Song of Songs

p. 188

Beauty or the Beast?

p. 189

His and Hers: Looking at Gender

p. 192

Contending the Gender Divide

p. 196

The Corpus and the Corps: Barthes and the Song of Songs

p. 204

Readers who Love

p. 205

Barthes, the Body and the Text

p. 207

The Pleasure of our Text

p. 213

Exploring the Song's Erotic Body

p. 215

The Right of Reply

p. 220

Desire and the Grotesque: Reading the Song of Songs with Kristeva (and Teresa)